Starting With Rousseau

Jean Jacques Rousseau is one of the most important and influential thinkers of the Enlightenment period and, indeed, of the whole history of philosophy. His political theory heavily influenced the French revolution, development of socialist theory and the growth of nationalism. Clearly and thematically structured, covering all of Rousseau's key works, Starting with Rousseau leads the reader through a thorough overview of the development of his thought, resulting in a more thorough understanding of the roots of his philosophical concerns. Offering coverage of the full range of Rousseau's ideas, the book firmly sets his work in the context of the Enlightenment and explores his contributions to social theory, theories of human nature, philosophy of education, political philosophy and autobiography. The book introduces the major thinkers and events that proved influential in the development of Rousseau's thought.

A new introduction to Rousseau, guiding the student through the key concepts of his work by examining the overall development of his ideas.

Emile, or On Education or Émile, Or Treatise on Education (French: Émile, ou De l'éducation) is a treatise on the nature of education and on the nature of man written by Jean-Jacques Rousseau, who considered it to be the "best and most important of all my writings". Due to a section of the book entitled "Profession of Faith of the Savoyard Vicar," Emile was banned in Paris and Geneva and was publicly burned in 1762, the year of its first publication. During the French Revolution, Emile served as the inspiration for what became a new national system of education. The work tackles fundamental political and philosophical questions about the relationship between the individual and society— how, in particular, the individual might retain what Rousseau saw as innate human goodness while remaining part of a corrupting collectivity. Its opening sentence: "Everything is good as it leaves the hands of the Author of things; everything degenerates in the hands of man." Rousseau seeks to describe a system of education that would enable the natural man he identifies in The Social Contract (1762) to survive corrupt society. He employs the novelistic device of Emile and his tutor to illustrate how such an ideal citizen might be educated. Emile is scarcely a detailed parenting guide but it does contain some specific advice on raising children. It is regarded by some as the first philosophy of education in Western culture to have a serious claim to completeness, as well as being one of the first Bildungsroman novels, having preceded Goethe's Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship by more than thirty years.

Rousseau first exposes in Discourse on the Origin of Inequality his conception of a human state of nature, presented as a philosophical fiction and of human perfectibility, an early idea of progress. He then explains the way, according to him, people may have established civil society, which leads him to present private property as the original source and basis of all inequality. Jean-Jacques Rousseau (1712 – 1778) was a Genevan philosopher, writer, and composer of the 18th century, mainly active in France. His political philosophy influenced the Enlightenment across Europe, as well as aspects of the French Revolution and the overall development of modern political and educational thought.

Few people can claim to have had minds as fertile and creative as the French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. One of the most influential political theorists of the modern age, he was also a composer and writer of opera, a novelist, and a memoirist whose Confessions ranks as one of the most striking works of autobiography ever written. Like many creative thinkers, Rousseau was someone whose restless mind could not help questioning accepted orthodoxies and looking at matters from novel and innovative angles. His 1762 treatise The Social Contract does exactly that. Examining the nature and sources of legitimate political power, it crafted a closely reasoned and passionately persuasive argument for democracy at a time when the most widely accepted form of government was absolute monarchy, legitimised by religious beliefs about the divine right of kings and queens to rule. In France, the book was banned by worried Catholic censors; in Rousseau’s native Geneva, it was both banned and burned. But history soon pushed Rousseau’s ideas into the mainstream of political theory, with the French and American revolutions paving the way for democratic government to gain ground across the Western world. Though it was precisely what got Rousseau’s book banned at the time, the novel idea that all legitimate government rests on the will of the people is now recognised as the core principle of democratic freedom and represents, for many people, the highest of ideals.

After an old university friend and fellow archeologist's murdered, forensic archeologist Ruth Galloway travels to Lancashire to examine the bones he found, which reveal a shocking fact about King Arthur, and discovers a campus living in fear of a sinister right-wing group called the White Hand.

Debates about freedom, an ideal continually contested, were first set out in their modern version by the eighteenth-century French philosopher Jean-Jacques Rousseau. His ideas and analyses were taken up during the philosophical enlightenment, often invoked during the French Revolution, and still resonate in contemporary discussions of freedom. This volume, first published in 2010, examines Rousseau's many approaches to the concept of freedom, in the context of his thought on literature, religion, music, theater, women, the body, and the arts. Its expert contributors cross disciplinary frontiers to develop thought-provoking new angles on Rousseau's thought. By taking freedom as the guiding principle of their analysis, the essays form a cohesive account of Rousseau's writings.